Kehinde Alabede

The project aimed to solve the problem of very poor connectivity from most remote sites despite the availability of an average of three service providers per site. Downtime happened virtually every week, resulting in an average availability of 95%, which was way below SLA. This led to loss of revenue, loss of return on investment, and reduced productivity.

As a network manager, I led a team to do a comprehensive review of all ISPs, taking technical and commercial information into account. We invited new ISPs, and after technical and commercial considerations and negotiations supported by the procurement team, we selected one primary ISP and another as a backup. I also redesigned the WAN infrastructure and introduced an SD-WAN solution to replace the existing traditional systems, Cisco L3 switches. Eventually, the project succeeded, saving 850,000 USD on annual operating expenses for the internet and leased-line services. The newly designed and implemented SD-WAN solution achieved 99.98% availability across sites, and the increased bandwidth for business needs led to improved productivity.

Flour Mills of Nigeria had a large enterprise IT infrastructure with around 2,000 users and computers, over 100 printers, and many other devices. The network core was powered by the Cisco 6500 series switches and several L3 and L2 models of Cisco switches, all end-of-life or end-of-sale products at the time of the project. The project objective was to critically assess the IT and network infrastructure and document and propose necessary upgrades to improve productivity, reinforce security, increase return on investment, and ensure that the infrastructure complies with the company's IT policy and meets industry standards.

As a network manager, I initiated the process and worked with the team to provide detailed network upgrade design documentation, which covered the spine and leaf network layers, as well as the network edge. I led the design and implementation of active-active HA and fully redundant infrastructure from the edge to the core and distribution layers. The project delivery was smooth and successful, with minimal downtime to production.

As a network manager, I led a team to deploy CUCM and Cisco Unity Connection. The company had Grandstream PBX initially, with 3rd-party IP phones like Grandstream, Yealink, and Fanvil. Under my technical and project management leadership, we integrated the GSM gateway and seamlessly migrated over 1,000 3rd-party phones with no significant downtime. We continued the project by gradually upgrading from 3rd-party phones to Cisco IP Phones.

CiscoWorks LMS is an integrated suite of management functions that simplifies Cisco networks' configuration, administration, monitoring, and troubleshooting. Having previously documented the enterprise network infrastructure, I was in the best position to lead the implementation. All devices were onboarded and migrated successfully, and configuration management and reporting were subsequently automated and optimized. We also implemented functional areas, such as monitoring and troubleshooting, administration, inventory, and work centers, thus enhancing network performance.

The project involved moving and relocating the enterprise network core switch and edge devices from the old building data center to the company's new head office data center. The estimated project duration was five months, costing 6 million Nigerian Naira.

I made a detailed, comprehensive design of current and future infrastructure. I also designed a migration plan, which involved detailed configuration of all active devices—Cisco 6508 core switches, Cisco 3560, 3750, and 2960 aggregation and distribution switches, Cisco 4400 series wireless LAN controller, Cisco ASA firewalls, Cyberoam firewalls, and other devices. The project was a huge success, with just about 10 minutes of downtime in the production environment, while the migration was seamless and business interruptions minimized. I used PMI's project management methodologies to manage the project both as the technical lead and the project manager.

The project aimed to deploy Nigeria's 1st advanced metering infrastructure data center. I was part of the design team and contributed to some aspects of networking, IT and network security, and server and storage infrastructure as the project manager and the network security infrastructure lead. Apart from managing the project, I also configured enterprise routers, switches, firewalls, and storage systems.